Revisit: The Unmitigated Brilliance of Bridesmaids and Kristen Wiig.

If I were to have made a list of the best films of the 2010's Bridesmaids would be on it. It’s a movie that drew comparisons to Todd Phillips “The Hangover” , but this was a very superficial connection. Todd Phillips is a very immature director and I mean that in the classical, traditional sense. His films always feel far too driven by impulses with little composure, edge for the sake of itself. The things that happened in the hangover films felt from a point of view, or sense of direction - like “Michael Keaton egging The Joker on in Tim Burton's “Batman”. “You wanna get crazy?! Lets get crazy!!” Its message and approach to male bonding is basic, juvenile, and much like “Joker” over simplified and barely connected to the story, akin to watching those very violent Saturday morning cartoons like G.I. Joe hot glue a little message on the end where they say something like “Stay in school,” followed by “Yoooooo JOE!” ...at that point who cares? Bridesmaids is actually from beginning to ending about the absurdity of expectations, the ones we put on ourselves, on our growth, on our relationships, the ruts we find ourselves in because of it, and how to step out of it. It's emotionally authentic, and mature, and even the ancillary characters have motivations that feel rooted in truth as well as farce. This is an incredibly thematically acrobatic and difficult feat- one this film accomplishes with an ease similar to 1984's Ghostbusters. Along those same lines, for many of those same reasons, if I were to pick the best scenes of this past decade, the airplane scene from this film would also be amongst the best. It's outrageous, it's temperamental, its hilarious, and it’s phenomenally structured…

The scene is the pinnacle of Bridesmaid's genius, edited brilliantly to show an upward staircase of unhinged anxiety. Cuts from one part of the plane to another are slowly but surely increased with a frequency that surpluses as each member becomes more frantic, until it spreads and pops. No one is trying to upstage anyone. Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey could almost form their own movie based off the conversation, improvisation, and chemistry they construct and erect in this scene. Melissa McCarthy is off on a quest for the holy grail of focused zaniness, Rose Byrne's giving a smug smarmy sermon from the book of comedy revelations, and Maya Rudolph is just there trying to keep it all together in a straight man role that shows off her range, and her intellectual, instinctual understanding of comedy. Everyone is on 10, actually no.. Spinal Tap's “11”. But Kristen Wiig, my God Wiig. I've seen this movie several times,  and it was still INCREDIBLY hard to watch this without losing it the entire time. It's small things like in the interaction between her and the (actually great) flight attendant when she puts the shades on. He confronts her, and with an overload of wispy caricature, Wiig simply replies “Ummm no". To big large obvious things like "There's a colonial woman on the wing!”.

Wiigs emphatically anxious screaming about something so seemingly absurd is hilarious. I could think on it over and over again and laugh forever. The joke itself absurd as it is has layers of relatability, the first being you recognize the reference (The famous Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” feat Will Shatner). Then she takes it somewhere you wouldn't expect in a million years - “She was churning butter, I saw her!” - and yet, in the context of the films anxieties, what it is she might ultimately be afraid, where this comes from, what the institution of marriage, and the expectations anchored to it mean- it deepens the connection, and the pleasure of the laugh.  Then there's Wiig’s commitment to the idea, to resonance, to some “truth”, that very special ambivalence every truly special comedian finds, but Wiig just seems to find levels under the pre-existing levels, contorting her face, twisting her mind to slip past the boundaries. Here she ultimately mines a similar level of paranoia as displayed in Shatner's episode.  "There's something they're not telling us!" is the encapsulation of the terror in the seminal Twilight Zone episode bent towards a different anxiety, but funneled through Wiig's energetic, conversation between tragedy and farce, it gets me every time. Wiig is so connected to every action, every word, (no matter how far out) it bends reality to her will. Knowing it couldn't happen,  wouldn't happen -with Wiig digging at the site where the seed of the absurd will grow - I laugh because I believe it could,  despite knowing the likelihood. That's her specific brilliance and it will continue to illuminate a grand career.